Monoculturalism
The existence European Union is, beyond any doubt, the best thing that has happened to humanity in its history to this date - or at least, to those who were lucky to be born into one of its member countries. It is also one of the most hypocritical organizations, which is not unexpected given inherently selfish human nature. It could be just business as usual, but alas, sometimes it reaches an embarrassing level of absurdity: advocating for open standards on paper, vendor neutrality and digital sovereignty, but using Microsoft XLSX formats to accept feedback on the very same acts, or sometimes ancient Rich Text Format (RTF), even though it has been used for decades to hide malware and still does not enjoy reproducibility outside of Microsoft Office suite.
Which is not new. Nobody can be surprised to discover that governments continue to depend on foreign proprietary formats that are not even tied to U.S. government, but shady private judical entities, despite the existence of ISO/IEC-standardized alternatives for more than 2 decades now. Government entrenchment in Microslop is a well-known case of instituonalized intellectual laziness. What is new, however, geopolical circumstances.
As we entered 21st century in a globalized society, the worst structural danger that corporate monocultures could present is quarterly-cycle thiinking that would drive them to enshittify critical software in chase for short-term metrics. But that world is gone, now we also observe active weaponization of trade. Today, it is no longer just about dark corporate patterns. We are facing risk of politically motivated attacks on governance by state-affiliated private entities. Today, institutional preference for a closed cognitive environment is a threat to democracy and sovereignty of nations: promoting instruments of governance that expose your government to diplomatic coercion is treason.
But it goes so much deeper, darker than that. This audacity of populism - a tradition that is well-established in western society due to its close structural alignment with techno-capitalism - is also becoming expressly anti-intellectualist and harms everyone at once. In a world where industrual progress and technological advantage can mean everything for a nation’s future, alienating genuinely technically literate indivudals is the worst choice clueless governors seeking immediate profit could have made - and this is a very familiar pattern.
A familiar pattern
History teaches that in some countries of 19th-century eastern Europe there existed a distinct social class called intelligentsia, defined not by birth or capital, but by intellectual labor and critical engagement with society. By the early 20th century, “student” and “intelligent” had become nearly synonymous with “revolutionary”, in part because they were indeed the primary driver of every serious reformist movement. When Bolshevik revolution came, they repaid their legacy of “thinking different” with systematic destruction, defining intellectual sophistication as bourgeois trait and eliminating critical thought idologically - and physically.
What’s worse is that not only Soviets state hate intelligence, but sought to simulate and control it, replace with “proletarian intelligentsia” made of institutionalized sycophants and performers. The workers, the increasingly beloved class of modern western children, could not tolerate the critical function of the intellectual class: the capacity to evaluate, refuse, and propose alternatives. Today the methods for bootstrapping same processes of consolidating power through the elimination of epistemic independence are much more refined.
Victims of populist rhetoric today are being subjected to astroturfing: audience capture through emotional arousal and community funneling. Outrage and political cynicism is a gateway drug that severely degrades rational evaluation while simultaneously driving social sharing and community-seeking behavior. The point of modern mass media and mainstream platforms is to not really engage, but do the opposite: funnel users towards radicalization by moving them into more ideologically niche channels. Joshua Citarella identifies correctly: “Under the current design of our communication networks, cultural commentary is structurally indistinguishable from channels that belong to official political organizations.” - every sufficiently large community (especially your favourite political Telegram chats and channels) are linked to political recruitment operations.
This is the real issue with modern “managed monocultures” - the convergent machinery of modern information warfare is dangerous because it is not merely oppressive toward the intellectual minority, but it is driving the cognitive equivalent of monoculture agriculture - an epistemic ecosystem with reduced variance, reduced orthogonality, reduced capacity for novel ideas that historically only come from the tails of distributions. Ultimately, down the road, it endangers lives of alienated literate individuals at times when the state has finally reaches the point where societal order exhibits phase transition to concentrate power in hands of a new little prince: they always end up seeking to replace intelligentsia with “proletarian intelligentsia”; institutional loyalists with smooth brains and uniform cognitive processes.
It was not the Soviets, but the logic of managed simplicity that killed intelligentsia. Now it is set out to do the same in post-capitalist society. Humans are but vessels for ideas; therefore, ideas can kill.
Tails of Distribution
But why intellectuals are a minority at all and why they matter? Well, because mathematical nature of our universe, that’s why. And even mentally incapacitated governors tend to recognize that they can’t argue with math.
Regardless of how one measures intelligence - this thing that is broadly understood as the capacity for abstract reasoning, systematic evaluation, and novel problem formulation - it is basically guaranteed to follow a Gaussian (normal) distribution: the familiar bell curve.
where μ is the population mean and σ is the standard deviation. The critical property of this function is its exponential tail decay: as you move away from the mean in either direction, the population density falls rapidly and asymptotically approaches zero.
This is not a social construction or an artefact of biased testing, Gaussian distributions do emerge naturally. Any trail that results from a large number of independent additive factors - generics, accumulated learning, cognitive exercise - will tend toward normality by mathematical necessity. An “intelligent” person at the right tail of the distribution will be improbably, as it is itself a combination of many rare genetic, developmental, and experiential factors stacking in the same direction of a larger overarching distribution.
This is the law. A law that governs lawmakers. Lex supra leges.
But where this truly connects to why intellectuals are important to well-being of a nation is, naturally, biology. Population genetics and ecology have established with mathematical rigor that rare phenotypes are disproportionately critical to population survival under novel stress conditions - and curiously, groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers.
The exact linking mechanism is Ronald Fisher’s 1930 theorem:
where is the mean fitness of the population, t is time, and is the additive genetic variance in fitness - and by definition, it is always non-negative, which means the population always moves uphill on the fitness landscape, or stays flat if there is no additive variance left.
This is the mathematical nail in the coffin of conformity and uniformity as a strategy:
A population with zero additive genetic variance in fitness cannot evolve by natural selection, regardless of how fit it is to existing conditions.
Treason of the State
From shallow perspective, this is nothing new either, that oligopolized educational system already was used to produce uniform educational curricula delivered by credentialed caste within a handful of dominant institutions to produce docile social groups with reduced individual autonomy. But when this epistemic homogenization happens not in the form of domestically accountable institutions, but anyhow involves foreign private entities whose governance structures, data access, and strategic alignments are opaque and are not subordinate to any democratic process, the harm crosses a qualitative threshold.
The Soviets physically expulsed intellectuals because they were a structural thread to the immediate goal of consolidated power. Today’s equivalent is subtler but no less deliberate: you do not need to deport the technically literate if you can instead make their expertise institutionally irrelevant. If you can structure government, education, and public discourse sucht that the person who understands what an open standard is, what vendor lock-in means, what a reproducible document format requires, is treated as an eccentric rather than an authority.
It is simply not culturan negligence anymore, but voluntary surrender of epistemic sovereignty of your own government: the system that, even if imperfectly, fulfills its obligations as per its public agreement (commonly called “constitution”) to actors whose interests are misaligned with those of the nation depending on them. A governing body or organization that processes its legislative feedback through Microsoft’s file formats does not merely accept a technical dependency anymore, but that the integrity, accessibility, and longevity of its own democratic record is subject to the licensing decision of a private American corporation.
Governing bodies of European Union accept that their civil servants’ cognitive workflows are shaped by the design choices of engineers in Redmon who answer to shareholders, not to the citizens those civil servants serve. Worth keeping in mind that some of those shareholders are directly or indirectly responsible for armed threats sent by Donald Trump to some members and allies of the European Union as well as allies of its member states individually.
At this rate, I am concerned not for the ordinary people, but for the governors and local oligarchs themselves. Immortals can bleed, and they also have equal stake in the system which they naturally want to keep. This ambivalence about the issue of foreign actors having leverage points in European governments, freely given, without consent of the governed, projects no power, only evokes cringe.
When a government official chooses an XLSX form over an ODS form because that is simply what one uses, they are not making a technical decision. They are enacting, in miniature, the same epistemic conformism that the Philosophers’ Steamers enforced at gunpoint. The difference is that this time, the intelligentsia is not expelled. It is simply made irrelevant - and asked, politely, to submit its comments in .xlsx format.